Maxine Beneba Clarke is a powerful and fearless storyteller, and this collection -- written with exquisite sensitivity and yet uncompromising -- will stay with you with the force of elemental truth. Clarke is the real deal, and will, if we're lucky, be an essential voice in world literature for years to come.-Dave Eggers

...a small tidal wave crashed into the face of the current Australian literary landscape... she could make you laugh, challenge you, inspire you. You’re guaranteed to be moved, something inside will shift in some small way. And isn’t that what we all want to achieve as writers?-Overland Literary Journal, online.

...oddly beautiful...Blending rhythm and melody into words like the best spoken word poets...a stunning attack on the pretentious white male gits who see poetry as an exalted profession to keep away from those who are loud, black, female, happy, or even in possession of lives outside poetry...

...The translation of rhythms from music into print; that’s the achievement, impressive, as the many who write poetry will know...You’ll find its movement gets into your own, into your foot against the chair leg, your fingers on the keypad...-Greg Westenberg, Crikey

The song-like Immigration Museum, by Maxine Clarke, has musical notes punctuating the spoken word and is a sharp riposte to the "official" account of Australia's immigration history...- Tim Richards, The Age

The writing of The Hate Race is supported by:

The Author

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean heritage. She is a spoken word poet whose essays, fiction & short stories have been published nationally, including in the Age, the Big Issue, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, and Going Down Swinging. Her spoken word has been broadcast nationally and internationally. Maxine’s second poetry collection Gil Scott Heron is on Parole was published by Picaro Press in 2010.Her latest collection 'Nothing Here Needs Fixing' was launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2013.
She is the winner of the 2013 Victorian Premier's Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her short fiction collection 'Foreign Soil&#39 (Hachette Australia, May 2014); and of the 2013 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize for her poem 'nothing here needs fixing.'
All material on this blog is copyright of the author and artist and must not be reprinted or distributed without written permission from the author.

Slam Up Overloaded

From Friday 9 September to Saturday 17 September 2011, Reviewers for Melbourne's Overload Poetry Festival were blog-squatting at Slam Up. You can read highlights of the festival coverage here, here and here or scroll back through the September 2011 archives to see the full festival coverage.